sentiment he has a range, to which he never otherwise

attains :

"Tis sweet to hear the watch-dog's honest bark

Bay deep-mouth'd welcome as we draw near home; 'Tis sweet to know there is an eye will mark

Our coming, and look brighter when we come ;

'Tis sweet to be awaken'd by the lark,

Or lull'd by falling waters; sweet the hum
Of bees, the voice of girls, the song of birds,
The lisp of children and their earliest words.

Sweet is the vintage, when the showering grapes

In Bacchanal profusion reel to earth. . . .'

One can think of the cradle and yet clink one's glass.

"Tis sweet to win, no matter how, one's laurels,
By blood or ink; 'tis sweet to put an end

To strife; 'tis sometimes sweet to have our quarrels,
Particularly with a tiresome friend :

Sweet is old wine in bottles, ale in barrels ;

Dear is the helpless creature we defend
Against the world; and dear the schoolboy spot
We ne'er forget, though there we are forgot.'

There is nothing of the littérateur here; it is the man talking to men. In truth, there is both a robustness and an orange glow in these sentimental passages which quiver on the brink of tears. They move like the panorama of sunset, full of that fluent reference to all things that distinguishes great-hearted talk. No writer gives you the same sense of coming in contact with a living flesh-and-blood personality. The personality disclosed in Wordsworth's poems is an inner personality. If you met him he would not be like his poems; but Byron, at his best, has no singing

mantle to put on. He has not, like Shakespeare,

a secret imaginative world.

He is no poetry fellow :

'My boat is on the shore,

And my bark is on the sea;

But, before I go, Tom Moore,

Here's a double health to thee!'

That might be trolled out in a mellow voice at the banquet of social joy. You can see him lifting his cup, the whole head, with the shining eyes, sparkling with animation.

It is the charm of contact. What Byron writes is near the summit of that perfection to which a purely external poetry can attain.

K

EMERSON

THE emotionalisation of knowledge,' says Mr. Hudson in his Introduction to the Study of Literature, is inevitably a slow and gradual process; but meanwhile, one measure of a poet's greatness as a thinker is his ability to perceive the possibility of it.'

Principal Shairp heads a chapter of his essay On the Poetic Interpretation of Nature, 'Will Science put out Poetry?' and in the copy in my hands Professor Nichol has answered this question with the genial note, 'Yes, for a hundred years.' Thirty-four of these years have gone, and Poetry has not yet seriously concentrated upon the task of the twentieth century. The novel nature of the task, and the general consciousness of a task being there, has for the most part merely damped the ardour of poets. Our love songs have not of late been good, because we have heard, faintly, a call to sing of the new interests. Sporadically in the last hundred years much has been attempted by great men, by Emerson, by Arnold, and by Meredith. Much too has been achieved, yet 'the emotionalisation of knowledge is inevitably a slow and gradual process,' and what Wordsworth said remains true: If the labours of Men of science should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the Poet will sleep then no more than at

present; he will be ready to follow the steps of the Man of science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of the science itself.'

But this time has not yet arrived: the conclusions of philosophy, science, and criticism are not yet any necessary part of the general mind-nay, more, the thinker himself seldom apprehends these conclusions emotionally. The first step is that he should do so; the next step is that all should do so.

Emerson, the forerunner in everything modern, is the forerunner in this. His poetry is to be judged not solely for its own excellence, but for its worth as a factor in an intellectual development that will be the ripest birth of the coming time. Then Poetry will cease to confine herself to the chronicling of action and the topics of Love and Doubt: she will expend her emotion on her inner Faith. A new Dante and a new Milton will arise to sing the beliefs of the

new man.

'To point forward and to help in the accomplishment' of this is the true work of Emerson's poems. This it is which gives them a character of their own, which makes them difficult and, to those who run away from modern life, even uninteresting. It is so much easier to luxuriate in the imagery of 'The Blessed Damozel.'

The duty of the literary critic is not, therefore, to praise Emerson for occasionally writing poems on more general patterns. He does so, but this is not his chief merit. It is not his chief merit, but the merit of these occasional poems of Emerson's is at times extremely high. In the poetry of quietism, of gentle and

resigned feeling, and of feeling observation, he has left occasional work which is not of its kind surpassable; and in a poetry of a lower order, a poetry whose merit is rhetorical, his occasional successes are so brilliant that he bulks large in the list of quotations familiar to the literate.

As a rhetorician Emerson has the supreme merit of not being rhetorical; I mean, that the balance of the saying is with the speaker. In Byron's rhetoric you feel that it is all, or if not all, chiefly in the address. He is thinking much more of the people he is addressing than of the thing said, with the consequence that Byron's rhetoric is never for long not wild. The target is hit, but there is a shower of arrows, many of which fly wide. In Emerson's rhetoric, though the thing is put in the most telling way possible, you feel there has been a preliminary and conscientious struggle to define the thing. It is legitimate rhetoric, the wit of sense :'Pay ransom to the owner,

And fill the bag to the brim.

Who is the owner? The slave is owner,

And ever was. Pay him.'

What a wrestle with the opposing argument went before that lightning throw!

'So nigh is grandeur to our dust,

So near is God to man,

When Duty whispers low, Thou must,
The youth replies, I can.'

One could not say that laborious moral experience. pondering on history that has

but as the result of a Sometimes it is a long preceded :

'For He that worketh high and wise,

Nor pauses in his plan,

Will take the sun out of the skies

Ere freedom out of man.